In his more grandiose moments—the ones in which he wasn’t berating himself for a lack of talent, ambition, looks, and intelligence—Desmond saw teaching as a waste of his time and abilities. Paid headaches was how he’d started to think of it. Deerforth College promised to be more of the same, although rumor had it the campus was exceptionally beautiful. If things worked out as he had planned, this would be his swan song to teaching. The biography of Pauline Anderton had been his work in progress for four years and was, the last time he’d bothered to calculate, nineteen months behind schedule. Last year, his editor had stopped phoning him to inquire about it, and recently, the ominous communication problems. And yet, Desmond couldn’t seem to pull together the material he had and draw it to a satisfying conclusion. He had enough facts, enough family history and social background, enough information about the recording industry in the 1950s and 1960s; he had two dozen chapters neatly typed, over a hundred interviews carefully recorded and transcribed, but Pauline Anderton, the long-dead woman herself, seemed to be swimming somewhere offshore, just out of his reach. I’m throwing you a life preserver, he wanted to tell her. Look what I did for Westerly. How many people get offered the chance for reincarnation? Her ghost wasn’t having any of it.

There’s a key to almost every life, a piece that holds the entire puzzle together and makes sense of all the disparate fragments: the ambitious mother, the clubfoot, the eye-opening journey to Spain. In the case of Westerly, it was the torment of his hidden sexuality. So far, Desmond had been unable to discover the piece that would bind together all the pages he’d written about Pauline Anderton, the essential truth or the essential lie that would bring her to life in his mind and, hopefully, on the page.

After her husband died, she moved to a suburb outside Boston to live with her sister and brother-in-law. Desmond hoped that by living in the area, turning over a few more stones, or simply soaking up the atmosphere, he’d find the elusive fragment he needed. That, he’d explained to Russell, was why he’d applied to six schools in the Boston area. The fact that they’d be temporarily separated was an unavoidable side effect.

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